Stalin полностью

Churchill, the scion of a British aristocrat and an American heiress, was lucky to be alive. Back in December 1931, he had been struck by a taxi on Fifth Avenue in New York City, after looking the wrong way while crossing the street. “A man has been killed,” a witness had called out erroneously.⁹ Churchill was a staunch imperialist, perhaps even more so than Chamberlain, having advocated for using poison gas against rebellious Kurdish tribesmen in Iraq, a British mandate. Also like Chamberlain, Churchill was ready, for the sake of the empire, to bargain with nasty types, but, unlike Chamberlain, he viewed the German national character as dangerous under certain leadership, such as Hitler. Regarding Munich, Churchill had prophetically told the House of Commons that Britain “has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame and will get war.” In 1940, many British elites were still waffling, urging a “settlement” with the Nazis. Chamberlain remained in government as lord president of the Privy Council (responsible for much of domestic policy, which did not much interest Churchill) and as formal leader of the Tory party. When Chamberlain entered the House of Commons on May 13, 1940, for the first time since resigning as prime minister, the “MPs lost their heads, they shouted, they cheered, they waved their order papers, and his reception was a regular ovation.”¹⁰ Churchill, however, steadfastly refused all entreaties to seek terms with Hitler, a man he would never meet, but whose measure he took.¹¹

Born the same decade as Churchill, Stalin missed these important cues. The ideologically blinkered despot tended to be dismissive of all British “imperialists,” lumped together, and kept in force the Comintern directive that “not fascist Germany, which entered into an agreement with the USSR, but reactionary anti-Soviet England, with its immense colonial empire, is the bulwark of capitalism.”¹²

Stalin had gone in deeper than ever with Nazi Germany. After the signing of the most recent commercial agreement, in 1940, Soviet demands had gone through the roof: they sought the nearly finished “surplus” cruisers Seydlitz, Prinz Eugen, and Lützow, and the blueprints for the battleship Bismarck, 31,000 tons of armor plating, torpedoes, ammunition, artillery, dehydration equipment (for synthetic fuel), steel-hardening technology, and all models of German planes in production (Messerschmitts, Dorniers, Junkers, Heinkels). The Germans were incredulous. Stalin, through Mikoyan, employed pressure tactics, holding up grain and oil deliveries, which induced the Germans to deliver some thirty state-of-the-art warplanes. He also interceded to reduce some Soviet demands. But Molotov and Mikoyan insisted to the Germans that the partially finished heavy cruiser Lützow had to be handed over. On May 26, 1940, for a price of 104 million reichsmarks, Germany allowed the ship, renamed Petropavlovsk, to be towed to Leningrad for completion, with their help.¹³ The Germans were worried that Soviet intelligence would be able to duplicate advanced German construction methods.¹⁴ Soviet counterintelligence would outfit the German team’s residence with listening and photographic devices, and promptly set up a honey trap with a young beauty.¹⁵

Stalin was still obsessing over Trotsky as well. On May 27, word came to the Little Corner that the NKVD had failed, yet again, to assassinate the exile, despite an assault on his villa by some twenty men and the discharge of more than 200 bullets into Trotsky’s bedroom. Beria demanded a report from the head of the operations team, Sudoplatov, then whisked him to Stalin’s Near Dacha, a half hour’s drive from Lubyanka, so that the operative could report in person on the failure—and on new plans to fulfill the assignment. Stalin was said to have asked a single question, then issued instructions: the entire global Trotsky surveillance network should be put on the line to eliminate Trotsky, because once Trotsky was eliminated, the need for surveillance would disappear.¹⁶